Loretta Riach
A Song For You
after Gram Parsons
Take me down to your dance floor...
take me down to the back garden of your childhood,
bucolic kikuyu lawn scattered with inflatable
sentimentality.
Take me out yonder
like a good horse with bad knees,
like a companionable knowledge of country-rock ballads,
take me for a ride
through the chambers of yesteryear, wearing
suggestible holes in the knees of my stockings
and with your hand on my knee,
a clasp of warmed intention.
I have this need to know the parts of you
that existed before I met you.
I want to eavesdrop on the stages of your life that made you this way.
I want to be taken through your early development,
to swing on the rusting swing-set of your youth,
to feel the earth
warm like a wild goose, like the song says, and full of gold.
I need you to take me down to your dance floor,
down to your 2013 suburban malaise dream sequence,
and down further, through the molten core,
through every instance of you
crying in a wardrobe, of taking the long way home,
and then finally
emerge into tomorrow,
where neither of us have ever been.
Loretta Riach is a twenty-two-year-old artist and poet, based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They make work about riverbeds and seismic activity, and are a facilitator at play_station artist-run space. More of their writing can be found in previous issues of Starling, Minarets 13, Takahē, and Mayhem Journal.